Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1487730
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S I 59 SOLANGE S. SCHWALBE MPSE: Bryen, tell us a little bit about Noisefloor. BRYEN HENSLEY MPSE: Noisefloor in its original incarnation was doing a lot of commercial work, which we still do to this day, but we've definitely grown the film work and the long-form projects to much bigger places than it was before. So I would say the volume of work that we're doing is much bigger and much more varied than what I was doing early on in my career. I was doing a handful of films a year, maybe two or three. Now we're doing six to eight, even 10 films a year with I don't even know how many short films and documentaries that we're mixing in with all that, and the video game work has grown exponentially. So I think for me, because of the places I was at, it was me and one other person. I'd have an assistant or work with one other person. The beauty of Noisefloor is the size and the growth of our staff and our creatives, which has been amazing, because now we have a full team of editors, sound designers, Foley artists, and re-recording mixers. I'm much more in the role of a supervising sound editor now, and I'm able to work with all these different creatives on each project. That's pretty different for me. Chicago's a little different, we were on the independent film side of things. You had to do a lot of all of those things yourself. I'd be doing all of the dialogue editing and the backgrounds and the sound effects and the sound design. I was doing all of those things. Now, we can really bring a team approach to it. Getting to work with all of these great creatives that we have is really, really amazing. Katie is also a big part of that on the Foley side of things. SSS: We have our different elements of sound editing; dialogue, ADR, sound effects, Foley, backgrounds that are divided into individual crews. We have the dialogue and ADR editors, and the sound effects, Foley, backgrounds editors. Do you divide your editing into these categories? BH: We have. Cory, my business partner, worked in LA for quite a long time, so he's brought a lot of that type of workflow to Noisefloor, and we have adopted a lot of that. The one difference is that it's not always the same person editing dialogue on every single film or every single project. It could be somebody else, but yes, we usually have someone for each of those roles, and then it all sort of flows into whoever is our re-recording mixer. Right now, we have two primary people doing most of our re-recording. We kind of hopscotch, you know, one person will do a film, then the next person will do the next one. Also, it depends on the style of film, everyone has their favorite types of things that they like to do, so we try to build the team for a project based on that. Cory and I do most of the managing. We're not that big, we have 13 people right now and we're in the process of hiring to build that up a little bit more. Sometimes Cory and I do argue over who's going to get to do what and when and how, and how the schedule is going to go, but for the most part, we get along on all that stuff. SSS: Now, these are in-house crew, they're not independently contracted—:they are a team with Noisefloor? Do they work exclusively for Noisefloor? BH: Yes, everybody is on staff. We have some freelancers, but not all that often. If we have to, we can bring on some freelancers. But mostly, we handle pretty much everything in-house and everyone's on staff. SSS: In Los Angeles, all the crews are subcontracted. They use the same people over and over and over again. But we're not on staff. Nobody's staff. We're all subcontractors. So it is a different way of working. BH: It is, it works just a little bit different in Chicago. A lot of the people who work for Noisefloor are people who came on as interns. They come out of college and intern with us and never leave. I think almost everybody who works with us has been through the internship program. We find people we like, we get them to the level and in a creative place that we like and we just don't really want to let them go. So we try to hang on to them as much as we can when we find the good ones . SSS: In Los Angeles, mostly we'll work on features and nothing else, or we'll work on television and nothing else, or we'll work on industrials or documentaries but nothing else, where Noisefloor covers all of it. I have here: "Noisefloor covers video games, TV shows, independent films, documentaries, commercials, podcasts, webisodes, radio, interactive, industrial, audio books…" What am I missing? BH: Not a lot, we do all of those things on a regular basis. I've done six audiobooks this year. I've got three narrative podcasts coming up that we do, I'm finishing two feature films right now. We start a TV show in the beginning